Errol Morris' filmed interview with former secretary of defense Robert McNamara sheds light on the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War, of which McNamara is said to be a key architect. The fog of war shrouds any true understanding of either event, but after watching Morris' engaging film, you'll feel a lot smarter and better informed about both.
As you'd expect from the creators of South Park, Team America is shocking, funny, and socio-politically astute. It's an edgy and sharp-witted parody -- of the redneck right, the reactionary left, and especially of the all-American action movie genre.
Four mercenaries make up Team America, and they fight terror wherever it rears its ugly head. Meanwhile, the head of worldwide terror, Kim Jong Il, is preparing a "peace" conference to be attended by all the world's leaders, lured to North Korea by the gullible Alec Baldwin and his Film Actors Guild. Only Team America can stop Kim Jong Il and his diabolical plan.
By now you know that Team America is a puppet movie. All the characters are marionettes. Coming from Parker and Stone, who decided to make cartoons using paper cutouts because they admitted they couldn't draw, marionettes seem like a logical leap to "live action" filmmaking.
And of course with Parker and Stone behind the strings, these puppets earn their R rating. Language, "nudity," graphic "sex," gore, and one horrific spasm of vomiting make this a movie parents will not want to have to explain to their kids.
Malick's style is not so much about storytelling as about mood-setting. One could say that The New World is "about" Pocahontas. It does tell her story from the arrival of Captain John Smith through her death in England. But there is much more to the movie than its events.
In the film's first movement, Malick tells us about John Smith (Colin Farrell), an Englishman who has fallen out of favor with his shipmates. Smith is sent off to scout and is captured by Pocahontas' tribe. She sees his inner strength, the immanent spark in him, and saves him from execution at the hands of her father. This also begins the film's first love story. The film's final movement shows Pocahontas' relationship with John Rolfe (Christian Bale), and their brief journey to England.
Episodic movies are always problematical. But Malick finds a way to smooth out the rough edges. He lumps these small episodes together into larger blocks with the same tone, feeling, and sound. The New World doesn't feel like a jumble of scenes stuck jaggedly together; it feels like three broad, smooth movements, each with its own overarching style and tone, even when Malick jumps days or weeks at a time.
The New World is not about the storytelling; it's a tone poem. It may have traditional biography as its base, but the movie is more about creating a space for your emotions, guided by your eyes and ears, to resonate in.
Fresh on DVD from the Criterion Collection, La Haine (Hate) takes place over the course of a day. The lives of Vinz, Saïd, and Hubert (Vincent Cassel, Saïd Taghmaoui, and Hubert Koundé), are as boring and aimless as they always are, but gnawing at them from inside is the spark of violence.
There isn't much of a story arc to La Haine; it's more a slice of life. It's no secret that this is a deliberate choice by director
Mathieu Kassovitz.
The pointlessness of the lives of the characters could make for a boring movie. Indeed, if you have no patience for character studies
and slice-of-life films, La Haine is not for you. But it has a lot going for it besides the plot. In addition to the
excellent acting and inspired cinematography, its release was a groundbreaking moment in French film history.
Twelve years later, La Haine lives on in the French psyche. Most recently, it seems prescient of the 2005 riots that took
place outside of Paris. In truth, there have been many problems between police and banlieu dwellers in France, for decades. La
Haine could have been made any time after about 1980 and it still would have the same resonance today. But it was Kassovitz in
1995 who broke that ground and brought a more American sensibility to French cinema.
The best of the extra features on the two-DVD set, surprisingly, is the one that has the least to do with the film itself. Featuring three sociologists, Social Dynamite is a fascinating history of housing projects. The three talking heads discuss not only the housing projects in France, but also Chicago and elsewhere in the world. High-rise housing projects were a good idea at one point. But the followup economic investment never came, and so the projects became places of isolation, boredom, and little opportunity.
This Criterion release is a great excuse to watch La Haine again.
No Country for Old Men holds up very well on the small screen and on second viewing. If anything, the movie is better the second time around, because you have the chance to look at the corners and sides of the screen. You don't need to pay attention to the story as closely; you can focus on the characters, their faces, their choice of words, and on the impeccable pacing imposed by the Coen brothers and their editor "Roderick Jaynes" (also the Coen brothers).
Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is a competent, methodical man who always seems to be one step behind the other two protagonists (Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem) who are both chasing a suitcase full of Mexican drug money found in the dusty desert border. Then again, he's at the age where he's thinking more about retirement than about his work.
As befits Cormack McCarty, the visual style is bleak (offset by the Coens' light touch). The tone is fatalistic. There are empty roads, distant horizons, and vast spaces. There are lawless men and impotent lawmen. There are missed connections, lost opportunities, and moral failings. It's a world of bad men that's easy to get trapped in and impossible to escape from.
The most impressive thing about these extra features is that the Coens participated, going on-camera to talk about the movie. They are not coy about their work; they are forthright and well spoken. They help make these featurettes feel less like marketing material and more like documentaries on the making of a film.
Dahmer barely registered on marquees across America, but those who saw the film were moved by Jeremy Renner's outstanding performance. It will surely gain a wider audience now that it's on DVD. It's just too bad that the DVD isn't better produced
Rather than exploitative, trashy, and made for TV, Dahmer is an art-house movie that treats its subject with seriousness, curiosity, and sensitivity, although that doesn't necessarily mean it lets Jeffrey Dahmer off easy.
The movie tells the story of the notorious serial killer in two timelines. The first one we see is the older Dahmer. He works in a chocolate factory and picks up gay men after his shift. The other timeline shows a younger Jeffrey trying to convince his father that he's a normal teenager with typical teenage troubles, even though he has already slipped into murder and madness.
The key to this movie is the portrayal of Jeffrey Dahmer, which is outstanding. Up-and-comer Jeremy Renner looks a little like Tobey Maguire. He has that same shy, everyday, boy-next-door quality, mixed with some repressed energy. Renner brings to life both the older, more self-assured Dahmer, and the younger, terrified, self-loathing teenager.
David Cronenberg's shocker explores the connections between sex and car crashes. Crash is a visual siren's song. Its somber tone, polished look, and haunting music invite intimacy and closer inspection, but the movie's theme is nothing most people want to be intimate with. That seeming contradiction makes Crash all the more interesting.
Baseball player Billy Chapel (Kevin Costner) reflects on his career and relationships while pitching a perfect game. For Love of the Game has been called a tearjerker, but for a large part of the movie, the emotion works. The performances of Costner and the supporting cast were good. The movie falters in showing his relationship with his girlfriend, Jane (Kelly Preston). She comes across a plot device rather than a character. The couples conflicts seemed to be written for the merely to advance the plot. Despite these flaws, the emotion of the story plays pretty well. The sentimentality isn't for everybody, but if you're interested in seeing it, it's worth a rental.
